I don't even know how to begin this essay, because so much thoughts are racing through my head when I am contemplating it. This is such a big piece and I am only scratching the surface here.
If you have been following my blog and reading my essays for a while now, you already know how I feel about colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy and white supremacy within self and the world in general. Yeah, they all need to go for good.
And it's all already happening, more and more rapidly over the last few years. And as I am tapping more and more into my rage about the state of the world's affairs, the extinction of species, clear cutting forests, killing animals, raiding the earth for oils, fossils, minerals with government ignoring the cliff we are standing on....I cannot oversee the role we, women, as almost half of worlds population (and especially white females from the western spiritual community) play in our own and Earth's extraction of resources.
Extracting from feminine resources and the danger of new age white feminism.
And how those two seem opposite, but they are quite similar at their core.
( I am sharing from the position of a whyte woman specifically, because this is where my experience is from. Take what resonates, leave what doesn't)
So lets dive in.
The four waves of feminism ( beginning in 19th century- present day) have granted women many social wins- to wear pants, to vote, to own property or business, to have a bank account, to go to work, available contraception, sex before marriage, the choice to marry/not marry, to have children/not have children, to drive a car etc.
Women's labor and our resources (such as body, time and energy) have been taken advantage of for the last 4,000 years. Our ways of being in this world have been questioned and sanctioned all the time by fathers, husbands, neighbours, institutions and the culture we grew up in. ( see my previous essay here)
"Since the feminist movement started, women are doing their best to be equal to men, but in a world created for men. A patriarchal world. One of hierarchy and power games, of climbing ladders and obsessed with progress, of war and violence. A world that denies death and getting old. A world that does not live according to the cyclical nature of Life/Death/Rebirth. And women, being born and raised in this system, try to be equal to men and get their worth acknowledged in a man's world." from Lilith- the exiled Goddess.
Women's labor and body-time-energy resource are still taken for granted and instead of living our own archetype and personal destiny we do adopt the archetypes thrown at us by others. The best example that comes to mind is seeing motherhood as anything less than labor of Love. Being a mother to children or projects is still seen as a free resource that anyone can have access to, because of the giving feminine nature. A modern woman is expected to have career and family, to look as pretty as when she was 20, to run a household, cook dinners and take care of wounded knees- it is seen as natural and therefore free. A stay at home mom's labor is not being seen as meaningful contribution to society and it is not reciprocated by the state. I am not even going to open the single-working-mom barrel of hardships and body-time-energy commitment.
So a big part of us is still feeding that narrative of how a woman should look, laugh, dress, how her house, her family and her career should look like. The systems of the world do not really want to see women thriving and in their power, in their wildness and ferociousness. These systems still need us to be agreeable, to not mind at all, to be civilised and play by the rules of the oppressor. (When I am saying wild and ferocious I don't mean covering oneself with dirt and fallen leaves, or going down the streets scraming like a banshee, although those are still optional of course ;).
The oppressor is not a single human, nor a single institution. It's the egregor, a non-physical entity ot thought form, that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of group of individuals. It's a collective entity that feeds on fear and anger. It's a trickster that steals what we seem to value the least and convinces us that we are free and empowered.
And this twisted game is no better exposed in the area of politics and supremacy colonialism, but also in modern white feminism and new age delulu spirituality.
There are many female coaches and space holder out there teaching modern and new age spirituality women how to manifest the man of their dreams, to „open and surrender“ to him. Countless courses teaching „divine feminine and divine masculine“ polarities pinned solely onto men-women bodied dynamics, instead of them being taught as the dance of evolution and growth inside of every human being. Coaches from this industry build their entire businesses on teaching false projections, when it comes to men and women and all the folks. in between. Toxic patterns are being reinforced and sold as the new freed femme; novels such as eg. 50 shades of grey- a dark Disney narrative, where instead with slippers the woman is being won over with a whip and a pleasuring stick by a dominant sadistic millionaire.
So lets talk archetypes for a few paragraphs. And specifically about the two of the three main female archetypes- Maiden and Mother.
(In Jungian psychology, an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious.)
When we start our healing process from our generational trauma of oppression as women, we naturally move and grow through the main female archetypes. ( or maybe better to say that archetypes are moving through us?!) - from our wounded Child self to the next phase of our journey as women- we grow into the Maiden.
The Maiden is the young woman who is discovering the pleasures of the world, playing, exploring and enjoying her life, weaving flowers for the love of her life.
It’s a great place to be- fresh and full of life and promises. But when this becomes the final destination of one‘s journey instead of yet another stop, then we, women tend to get stuck in Maiden, never really growing up to Mother and with no chance of becoming the Crone. One of the main traits of the Maiden is the learned helplessness (something I myself struggled with my whole life up until recently). Learned helplessness is learned powerlessness to change our circumstances. We give up on ourselves, because it's all very hard and prefer avoiding and complaining about smth than rather finding a way to change/flip/improve it. There is the idea that someone else is responsible, and they are going to show up and save the day/solve our money issues/ get us out of our misery etc.
( note: A lot of biological mothers are still dwelling in the Maiden archetype. By the same token Mother archetype is not restricted to a woman with a child only.)
The Mother on the other hand knows how to take care of others in her community, not only herself and her beloved. She can come over and wash your dishes, while you’re putting your child to sleep. Or she can mind your kids while you are having a shower. She will stand up to the injustice being done to your child as if it is done to her own. She knows how to multitask and understands the biological urge of every living being to simply be. The Mother understands sacrifice and she is raising her voice for the protection and safety of all children, sovereign in her choices.
She loves and cares for the land too, for she knows her family’s and community‘s existence depends on the soft nourishing soil beneath her feet.
But we have been so deeply conditioned by the capitalistic and deepIy narcissistic world we live in that we choose to cover our eyes and ears, lulling us to stay forever Maidens. To be fearful of authorities- such as governments, bosses or simply the opinion of the next door neighbour, and to buy into the narrative of being „nice and pretty“ all the time, not to give a damn about what’s happening in the world around us, as long as we and our nuclear family are well and thriving.
This worldview is telling us that we are so fragile, that we need to bathe in self care 24/7, to serve ourselves first and foremost, to spend hours in self pleasure, and magnetise our bodies to attract yet another looking for our submission man, to drink cacao in floaty dresses day in-day out and never really rise to meet the world.
A Maiden centres men (or her man) and her wellbeing. A Mother centres her community and the wellbeing of the Earth.
This is a ripe field for discussion. I do not claim to have all the answers, but I see and want to name the dynamics- in myself and in the world around me.
The whole white world of feminists and women's right organisations, social media priestess and animal rights NGO's abandoned the Middle East and Palestinian women and children, choosing to look away and take care of themselves instead. The white feminism virus narrates of capitalism and dogmatic religious ideology that freezes our natural empathy, love and compassion for the beings of the world and cultivates competition, over-prised courses, appropriating other cultures and their medicine palnts (cacao, ayawaska, peyote etc), stories and even clothes , inflated self image and the building of fempires. (does it sound familiar as trajectory?)
Having said that, being at a place in our lives, where we are still a Maiden is not to be shamed or guilt-tripped- again all of our experiences have their validity and time and space to unfold as necessary steps along the way. But when the cultural narrative aims to keep us women either fragile adolescents afraid of the big bad world or feminist, blindly serving the patriarchal system again, the Earth we live upon is dying.
By the same token our feminine resources ( a term that I came across on the page of IG account of @embodiedbreath) are being extracted and not really valued, the resources of the Earth are being extracted at a high speed too.
When we humans became the Universe's centre in our own ideology, we actually fell off it. Dethroning God-Love as the Creator of all living things, we just assumed it was us that are omnipotent. Turning religions into tools and weapons against each other, inflicting conflicts in countries far away only to get to their land's resources, femicide and ecocide have become the new normal of our governments, choosing to turn a blind eye on the suffering of the less privileged (mainly BIPOC people).
So is there something we can do?
𓁿𓂇 I am not a fan of peaching, persuading or moralizing, but rather teaching through what's already embodied. At the end of the day everyone will go through the experiences they needed in order to grow and evolve. My desire is that this does not happen on the expense of countless humanitarian crisis and ecological losses, and yet...events will still unravels at their own pace and Divine's grace.
𓁿𓂇 Becoming aware of the patriarchal feminism as a coercive way of being- connecting the dots and recognising the patterns is a big step into breaking the spell around unsustainable female empowerment and toxic spirituality and seeing it for what is- another tool of the patriarchal order to keep us women quiet by throwing us breadcrumbs.
One of the decolonizing teachers I am learning from, Sarah Durham Wilson, says:
"I pray today is the day women of the world realised we are not terrified. We are terrifying. " and that we are beings of consequences.
(the same way Mother Earth is showing us, her children, that there are consequences to our actions of exploitation and pollution)
I do feel the need to clarify the word terrifying here. Being terrifying as a woman is not the same as being terrifying as a man in a patriarchal world- it is not violent for any being in a harmful way. But she does disrupt. She dismantles the illusions. A terrifying woman disrupts the fabric of projections thrown at her, owning her own self and resting in her magnetic power.
𓁿𓂇 Showing up in places- virtual and/or physical, that are decolonizing the narrative of what we already know and being open to receive wisdom and knowledge from the indigenous people of the world, without consuming and devaluing the source.
𓁿𓂇 If you are already working with some indigenous medicine of another culture, are you in the habit of giving back to the source? To the communities that shared their wisdom with you? Ayni is a beautiful word and the concept of reciprocity between humans, nature and the universe, practiced by the Andean mountain communities. When I give or receive, a reciprocal act , based on respect takes place and keeps the energy flowing in a prosperous way.
𓁿𓂇 Give credit, where credit is due. The least we can do is being respectful to all the teachers and teaching we've received.
𓁿𓂇 I keep referring to prayer and/or some form of daily practice that grounds us, as an amazing tool to sit with challenging and squirmy pieces. Prayer rebuilds the connection between human and Divine and soothes the soul in times of distress, grief, anxiety. The Way or the Rose by Clark Strand is a beautiful book on prayer.
𓁿𓂇 Spend time in nature and allow her to teach you about simplicity, synergy and reciprocity. Give back to the land that feeds you.
With Love and Gratitude
Hrissi
